Normal Place, Normal People
by T.Pike
Summary: Stan swears that the anomaly tracker is broken; there's nothing weird about the town it led them to. Ford insists there must be something there-there has to be. Why else would the tracker keep beeping? Part 3 of "Redacted" series, following the events of "Ghosts in the Machines."
1. Potters Springs

Ford's incessant muttering had degraded into incoherency long ago; Stan ceased listening some time before that. In his attempts to ignore the cold, he watched the townsfolk pass along the thoroughfare, their movements leisurely, as if nothing could ever possibly call for swiftness. He spent the afternoon in such casual observation, resting against the Romantic statuary that adorned the main square. A placard to his left, whereon he had been resting his elbow, once identified the patina coated man on the pedestal behind him; the lettering had worn down years ago, and his short attention had no intention of deciphering the ghosts of the words.

As darkness began to settle and his brother showed no signs of abandoning the fruitless task of "fixing" the anomaly finder, Stan fished his harmonica from deep within his coat pocket. He played a few experimental notes softly. Satisfied with his fingers' articulation, bound as they were in his thick gloves, he proceeded to play a full song, then another, and a third. An occasional passerby noted his sleepy shanties, but, for the most part, the hollow notes fluttered away with the wind. Stan nearly completed a fourth tune before Ford looked up from his work, at which point Stan dragged the instrument from his face.

"What's the word, Sixer?"

"There's nothing wrong with my anomaly tracker," Ford decided flatly. With a final turn of the screw, he reattached the back plate. "There must be _something_ in this town."

"We've been sitting out here for hours, and I haven't seen one weird thing yet." Stan's gaze drifted back to the bundled people passing by. "And, believe me, I can recognize weirdness when I see it."

Ford scoffed as he bound the tracker to his wrist. "Well, I dissembled the entire device, inspected each of its components, and reassembled it, and—" He paused, allowing the tracker's quiet beeping to speak for itself. "We haven't investigated thoroughly enough, clearly."

"Clearly."

"Unfortunately, the tracker doesn't seem to be able to identify a specific location for the weirdness," Ford continued, unfazed by his brother's exasperation. He tapped the device, hoping for something to change. Nothing did. "We'll have to do some old-fashioned gumshoeing, I suppose—"

Stan huffed a sour note on the harmonica. "There's nothing to investigate." He spared a glance for his brother before letting his attention wander again. "Normal people, normal place…"

"Then why did the tracker lead us here?"

Stan shrugged. "I still think it's broken."

Ford rolled his eyes. "Come on, Stanley, what's the harm in a little adventure?"

Pushing himself off the statue, Stan stiffly rubbed at his lower back. "Ask my ass, which is frozen from all the 'adventure' we've had all day."

Ford punched his brother's shoulder. "Let's check the library first; if there's been any strange activity in the town, there must be some record of it."

* * *

Agitated, Ford's fingers drummed across the table. Each rap came in quick succession, quick enough to be mistaken for a single thud; between the beeps from the anomaly tracker on his wrist, his hand jerked slightly upward to allow his fingers to cascade down onto the old hardwood. The seven-note staccato tapped continually as the twins sat otherwise silent ( _beep-one-two-three-four-five-six, beep-one-two-three-four-five-six_ ).

Ford pushed up his glasses, rubbing his right eye with his free hand. "There's nothing here," he complained with a groan. "A hundred years…absolutely nothing. How could it be that nothing odd has ever happened here?"

"I told you the damn thing was broken." Stan glanced out the window. Despite the streetlight nearby, he only saw darkness. "Come on, Sixer, let's go grab a bite to eat or something. I'm starving."

"Doesn't it strike you?"

"The hunger pangs?"

"What—Stanley, focus." Ford sat up, abandoning the archival newspaper on the table. "Nothing at all noteworthy happening in a location for a century? Aside from the fact that the anomaly tracker pointed us here, the statistical probability of such a thing is astronomical—"

"Maybe it's just a boring town." Stan stood and stretched, his joints popping loudly. "I want to find literally _anything_ interesting here, but there's nothing."

Ford made to argue, glanced back to the uninteresting collection before him, and changed his mind with a hefty sigh. "Perhaps…" He frowned. "I don't understand why the tracker directed us here…"

"Maybe it's so phenomenally boring that your thing thought it was weird."

Chuckling, Ford rose from his chair. "That could well be the case. What a disappointing entry for the journal."

Stan waved off the concern. "We'll just make up a story to tell the kids. Dipper will forget about it by the time he gets to read the journal for himself, anyway."

"One can only hope so. I'll let you explain any glaring inconsistencies…"

* * *

The warm meal had lifted Stan's mood considerably: he chattered brightly, gesticulated widely, grinned happily, laughed loudly, and vivified the atmosphere generally. His ebullient effervescence neither effused nor embrightened his brother, who trailed him down the main boulevard, half-lidded eyes unfocused, gloved hands hidden deep within his coat, muffling the anomaly tracker's shame. Eventually, as he received lesser and lesser response, Stan grew quiet, allowing a frown to occasionally mar his joy. The total silence between them lasted only half a block; as they passed by the unidentified statue, a muted sound halted them.

Music escaped from the building across the street, a decaying night club that had long ago abandoned the hope of demolition. Stan had been sure, as he watched it all afternoon, that it would fall apart if the wind blew too hard; apparently at least a few people had managed to enter with their musical instruments for an impromptu jazz jam session.

"Come on, Sixer." Stan hooked his arm around his brother's shoulder and directed him to the derelict structure. "Everybody loves music."

A brief smirk tugged at Ford's lips. "Well, when you aren't playing, they may."

"I'm not gonna dignify that with a response."

The night club, on first glance, appeared empty. A few tables and chairs remained from some earlier time, still vaguely arranged around the stage, and the single incandescent fixture above the bar cast long, eerie shadows across the room. The music came from the encompassing darkness of the stage, where, on closer inspection, four young musicians appeared—one playing a violin, one playing a saxophone, one playing a bass, and one playing an accordion. None seemed to notice the twins enter or seat themselves, too involved with improvising arrangements to sense the world beyond their collective instruments.

The up-tempo rhythm seeped into the twins, releasing the tension their bodies harbored from the day's failed adventure and drawing smiles onto their faces. Gradually, the music intensified—it quickened, it loudened, it deepened, it complicated; the musicians became single-mindedly fixated on their craft, fingers flying and breath quickening, notes and phrases racing in rapid succession, euphony degrading into cacophony only to rebuild from the fortune of haphazard harmonies, unintentional synchronicity building something beautiful. And underneath all of it came another, quiet sound, some unidentifiable noise, familiar, though eluding the coarse vernacular of the spoken word—

Fizzle.

It was the fuss of a burning fuse, the furioso of friction smoldering until flashing, flames fully fluttering alight. The violinist's fingers flew across the catgut, fire dancing with the movement, wisps of smoke floating ever upward. Beneath the crackling flare was another sound—

Drop.

Weeping from the bow, along the curvature of the bass, water welled into shallow pools. The bassist's body wavered as the fluid flowed under gravity's pull, smoothly pumping through the natural runnels formed at joints and contact points, weaving its way down the lacquered wood, warbling the low tone as it bubbled past the hollow openings. Softer yet was another—

Crack.

Chunks of earth crumbled, cascading down the accordionist, clumps catching among the pleats of the bellows before careening to join the other clods collecting in piles on the stage. Amidst the dirt came rocks, clambering continuously in discord, contending with the reedy music in its clamorous descent. Barely audible beneath it all—

Hiss.

It hardly registered, but the faintest hush of breath whispered from the saxophone, between the finger holes and cork joints, air escaping intermittently in huffs and whistles. The bell blew its melody progressively softer as the saxophonist simply sublimated, melting solid into air, whisking it to the ether, withering away the being from whence it came.

The musicians degraded, and the music played on, fervent—urgent—excited. As the crescendo reached its peak, there was a pause, nigh imperceptible, a momentary respite before the storm. And then the beat ended.

The violinist ignited. The bassist liquefied. The accordionist disintegrated. The saxophonist evaporated.

Instantaneously, all four disappeared. The flames engulfed the violinist, leaving nothing but a scorched violin on the burned patch of stage; the water forming the bassist fell in a torrent, a deluge bursting forth from its encasement, a wet, warped bass in its wake; the accordionist shattered, crushing the instrument in the avalanche that ensued; the saxophone dented where it hit the floor, its player suddenly ethereal.

In the musician's absence, the battered instruments lay useless on the stage. Their song echoed, haunting, into the rafters; as the denouement drifted, cathartic silence settled into its place, returning the night club to its abandoned solitude.

Stan moved first. He flopped against the back of his chair, nearly knocking it back in the process; he ran a hand through his hair with a prolonged sigh. "Holy Moses…"

Ford nodded, also relaxing in his chair. "My sentiments exactly."

"Can't even break into an abandoned building without some weird shit happening."

A breathy laugh tumbled from Ford's lips; it developed into a full laughing fit by the time his brother looked over.

"You, uh, okay, Sixer?"

"It's just…" Ford stifled his snickers just long enough to answer. "Well, I _told_ you there was something weird in this town—my anomaly tracker _isn't_ broken."

Though he made to protest, Stan had no defense. He groaned instead.


	2. Redacted

_Anomaly 115: Potters Springs, Alaska (potentially, though perhaps we're still in British Colombia)_

 _Despite Stanley's protests to the contrary, the small town does hold some rare oddities. My tracker had trouble locating precisely where (or, more accurately, who) the anomalies were, and we were forced to do some old-fashioned investigation to find the signal's origin. I even managed to get Stanley to come to the library!_

 _Unfortunately, we found no information there. Reading through a hundred years of the town's local newspaper yielded nothing worth noting—which I found to be an oddity on its own, but in no way assisted us in our search. It wasn't until we were on our way back to the Stan o' War II that the anomalies finally chose to appear._

Half of a sentence was blotted out.

— _into what must once have been a night club—_

Another phrase was inked over.

 _The music was beautiful, hypnotic, almost. It reminded me of the music S and I used to hear on weekends, when we'd walk the boardwalk on the way home from a hard day's work on the original Stan o' War…what was the name of that night club, by the ice cream shop? The one Pop used to take Ma to on their date nights? The name escapes me at the moment. But the music was always enchanting._

Stan's handwriting crammed into the margins: _Nucky's Nocturne._

 _There was little light in the club (honestly, I was surprised that the building still had power at all). Unfortunately, the band had no audience—a real shame, considering their talent—but they didn't seem to mind. They didn't even notice that S and I had—_

A couple of words were scribbled out and replaced in Stan's hand.

— _legally entered a public location and in no way damaged any property that may or may not have been inside._

On the bottom half of the page, Ford had drawn the four-man band on the stage. Unlike many of his drawings, there was little detail; the faces, notably, had been left blank. The next paragraph had been blacked out, half-heartedly, leaving a few words and short phrases discernable.

 _Stanley is still mad that I was right about Potters Springs. I won't let him live this down anytime soon._

"I guess I can let that last line stay," Stan murmured with a sigh. "Let it be documented that exactly once in his life, Stan Pines was wrong."

Ford snorted, pulling the journal from his brother. "I'm glad that everything I write isn't objectionable."

"Look, Sixer, if you wrote everything down in your old journals the way you do this one, it wouldn't've taken me thirty years to get that thing up and running." Stan folded his arms. "You seem to forget that the kids are going to be reading this."

"And?" Ford matched his brother's motion. Begrudgingly, he admitted, "Yes, some of the things I wrote about our trip to Hurricane were inappropriate, and some of the things I wrote about Sean were in poor taste, but I don't see what's so problematic with our adventure today."

"That was a pretty graphic description of a man being immolated," Stan grumbled. A frown wormed onto his face. "They're thirteen, Stanford."

"They've proven themselves quite sufficiently." Ford scoffed. "After all they've handled, you really think they'll be troubled by anything I write in the journal?"

"They shouldn't _have to_ read anything 'troubling'!"

Ford threw his hand up, exasperated. "I'm not penning a children's tale, Stanley—this is an account of my research! Sometimes, troubling things happen. That needs to be noted."

A long-suffering sigh huffed from deep within Stan's diaphragm. He pinched the bridge of his nose, considering his response, eventually choosing to push himself out of his chair. "I'm gonna go check everything on deck." Without waiting for his brother to answer, Stan opened the cabin door and disappeared into the chilly night.

Scowling, Ford slumped in his chair. His expression remained sour as he snatched his journal from its place on the table beside him. He flipped through it, glowering at the largely redacted sections; each black splotch, each crumple, each tear deepened the knit in his brow. Reaching one of the completely marked-out pages gave him pause; he tried to recall the words beneath the ink, glancing over the readable words around it for context. Ford found that he couldn't remember what the actual words were—a revelation that bothered him far more than he anticipated—but he recalled the events with striking clarity. He firmly believed that the decision had been a sound. It may even have been right.

But would that come across to a child? Dipper so admired him, through his hubris and folly, because he thought his great uncles were good men. Would he still think so if he had been permitted to know the true events of Hurricane?

Ford found his self-righteous fury simmering to general discontent. He read over the visible words again, displeased; on the fourth pass over, he took a deep breath. Abandoning his journal, he strolled to the kitchenette and busied himself with the coffee percolator. His right eye hurt.


End file.
